Caprice and Rondo Read Online Free PDF Page B

until spring. Or not until I decide where I’m going. I just want to pass an entertaining winter with my inferiors.’
    Ten minutes later, picking themselves up from the snow outside the Artushof: ‘They’ll never let you back in,’ Benecke said.
    ‘Yes, they will. Anyway, you started the fight, and they’ll forgive you. Do I get a bed?’
    ‘No,’ had said Paúel Benecke. ‘You’d spoil my winter complaining about your women.’
    ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Colà.
    ‘You’d get into bed with my women.’
    ‘Of course,’ had said Colà. ‘You couldn’t stop me. That’s why you don’t want me to come.’
    That time, no one separated them, and it was three days before either of them could talk without lisping. Colà had been living in his house ever since, and Danzig would never forget him, nor would Paúel Benecke. He would never have to forget him. He was going to keep him in Danzig for the rest of his life. Despite the blood on the snow.
    Now he said, ‘So where have you left her?’
    ‘Never mind. Anyway, she’s not yours, she’s mine. I got a doctor to see to the boy.’
    ‘I thought his arm was going to come off. You ought to be chained up and put in a lazar house.’
    ‘Come on,’ Colà said. ‘I’m going to tame her. Then I’m going to sell her to you.’
    ‘Before or after you pay me for your lodging?’ Paúel Benecke said. He gazed with fascination at the scratches all over the other man’s neck and arms. He said, ‘What if she’s diseased?’
    ‘You’re worried?’
    ‘No,’ said Benecke. ‘But I’m thirsty, and the look of you is spoiling my thirst. Good night, fool.’
    He left, slamming the door. You found a man you could enjoy winters with, and he still behaved, at times, like an idiot. In their first weeks together, he had discovered it. Ingenuity, yes; lunacy even, to a degree — those were acceptable, those were what the merchants from Lübeck had enjoyed. But these escapades led by Colà were suicidal.
    Three weeks after he came, the situation had come to a head over the bison hunt. Then they had been out of the city, travelling over snow to the forests, with their dogs, their nets, their spears and arrows. Colà had learned, God knew from where, that the beasts were enraged by red cloth, and had brought some. It had ended with the death of two men, while Colà cavorted round one of the animals in snow-crusted boots, whirling the fabric round his fur hat and calling and whistling.
    It had been funny, all right. In the midst of the extreme danger that threatened them all, it was still funny to see the big man addressing the bison in prose, song and verse, while two thousand pounds of massive beast lowered its horns and skittered backwards and forth, its eyes red as lamps and the snow flying in clods from its coat as the cloth whisked about, almost touching. Then a dog got tossed in the air, and a man; and after the second man died, Paúel gave the order and they all ran in with their spears and took the beast, to the risk of their own lives. Paúel had led the party that harnessed the big man to a sledge and whipped him back to their lodge; he ran them into a tree on the way, and was arranging to hang Paúel with the harness when they got hold of him again. They were none of them sober.
    That was close to being all right. Winters were spent in rough play and rough punishment. But when they were back home, and had broken the news to the two men’s wives, and had the bison taken off to be jointed, Benecke had got hold of Colà and sat him down by the stove and said, ‘Stop it, or get out. I’m not sick of life yet. Neither were my two lads.’
    ‘I’m culling them for you,’ Colà said. ‘I thought it was a tough life at sea.’
    ‘Some seamen need to be tougher than others,’ Benecke said. ‘He was a pilot, one of those boys. But I notice they’re all the same to you, anyway.’ He waited. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you want to go home, my big man? Perhaps you